NCAA: Coach says Buffs ready to defend crown

ATTITASH, N.H. — The defending national champion University of Colorado ski team arrived at the site of the NCAA Championships late Saturday after an all-day trek from Boulder, and head coach Richard Rokos said he’s pleased with his team’s readiness as racing is set to begin on Wednesday.
ATTITASH, N.H. — The defending national champion University of Colorado ski team arrived at the site of the NCAA Championships late Saturday after an all-day trek from Boulder, and head coach Richard Rokos said he’s pleased with his team’s readiness as racing is set to begin on Wednesday.
    “Everybody is skiing good, and everyone is healthy,” Rokos said. “Maria (Grevsgaard, the winningest Nordic skier in the West this season) looks just awesome in practice; I wish we could count her result twice.
    “It’s kind of scary, because we don’t have anything to blame (if we don’t win). Every one is a great state of mind and everyone is excited to go out and do some damage. It feels like everyone is peaking — we had some slack a couple weeks ago, so if that had to happen, it came at the right time. Everyone is back from that little bump in the road, so the sky is the limit.”
    A total of 22 schools will be participating in New Hampshire this week, but only four schools qualified the NCAA maximum of 12 racers: Colorado, Dartmouth, Utah and Vermont; the four are an all-time low. The University of Denver qualified 11, Middlebury and Montana State 10, and Nevada and New Mexico nine; no other school had more than six.
Colorado has qualified a full team for the first time since 2003, and even though the Buffaloes became the first to win a title short the maximum in winning with 11 last year, Rokos certainly isn’t counting the proverbial chickens before they’re hatched.
    “A full team is still not any ticket to the title, it just gives you more peace of mind,” he said. “This year, with the slalom wrapping up the championships, it’s going to be mental roller coaster until the last minute. It’s all about how the whole week develops. Having slalom as the concluding event makes for more excitement, more nervousness.  Statistics show that about thirty percent in slalom usually DNF, so things can change and shake out dramatically.”
    The freestyle-cross country races open the championships on Wednesday, with the men’s 10-kilometer first up at 7 a.m. MST, followed by the women’s 5 km at 9 a.m.; both will take place at the Jackson Cross Country Center.  
Alpine takes center stage on Thursday with the giant slalom races: the women start at 7 a.m., followed by the men at 10:30. The classical cross-country races will be on Friday, with the women’s 15 km at 7 a.m., followed by the men’s 15 km at 9.  The slalom races will finish off the meet on Saturday: the first runs are at 7 a.m. (men) and 8:15 (women); second runs follow at 10:15 a.m. and 11:30, respectively. Click here for a complete schedule of events .
    The scoring format has changed, as in the past only the top 21 scores counted toward team totals; now, those schools that qualified full teams can count all 24, and those with 11 skiers can count 22. That’s a direct benefit to those who qualified the maximum, but still does not make it impossible for those who did not; Colorado won by 98 points last year, a margin that still would have been 75 had all scores been counted.
    “Our goal never changes, it’s always the same, we’re going after the trophy,” said Rokos, who has won five national championships on his watch at CU, including back-to-back crowns on one other occasion, in 1998-99.
    “We are bringing at least three people that can be on the podium — Lucie (Zikova), Maria and Matt (Gelso), and probably more, but those three proved it consistently during the season. In the case of those three, I would very much believe that they’ll match what they did during the season. So if that is true to form, what happens with the rest of the team will obviously decide our chances to win. Points for second and third place usually decide how high you can shoot for.”
    Gelso (men’s Nordic), Grevsgaard (women’s Nordic) and Zikova (women’s alpine) all earned No. 1 seeds out of the West, with four others earning top six seeds. Zikova is out to defend her 2006 title in the slalom, while junior Kit Richmond is gunning to do the same in the freestyle. The Buffs tied their school best with four individual titles last winter.
    CU’s roster breaks down by eligibility into three juniors, four sophomores and five freshmen, as the nine underclassmen make this the youngest team Rokos has ever taken to a national championship meet, topping the seven just last year.
    While obviously the first appearance in an NCAA meet for the five freshmen, the seven others have eight national appearances among them. Zikova, a junior, will be skiing in her third NCAA Championships, with all six other upperclassmen making their second appearance: Josh Bryan and Lisa Perricone (alpine), and Grevsgaard, Richmond, Karl Nygren and Lenka Palanova (Nordic).
    The five first-timers for the Buffaloes include Gelso and Kristin Ronnestrand in cross-country and Heidi Hillenbrand, Stefan Hughes and Drew Roberts in alpine.
    Colorado and Denver dueled, for the most part, all winter in the West, with Utah coming on strong at the end. The Pioneers won the Western regional in a tight battle over CU and Utah a few weeks ago.
    Individually, Colorado skiers won 14 of the 38 races in the Western regular season, with Denver racers winning 11; seven schools in all had individual champions, as New Mexico (4), Utah (3), Western State (3), Alaska (2) and Montana State (1) also had skiers top the podium.  CU’s Grevsgaard won the most titles, seven, including a sweep of the season’s five classical races.
    It was a different story in the East. Dartmouth, flying high from a third-place finish in last year’s NCAA meet, won all six carnivals as Big Green skiers captured 25 of the 42 races en route to winning the eastern crown. Schools from the West have won the last 12 crowns, dating back to Vermont’s 1994 title, but Dartmouth is a definite contender to wrestle the trophy back for the Northeast.
    “Typically, Dartmouth is very strong in alpine, but the word is they’re much improved in Nordic,” Rokos said. “But until we get into competition with the eastern schools directly, it’s hard to figure out our chances or their chances since there is never anything to compare during the season. The same with UVM [Vermont], until we race them, we don’t know them.”